Success in Chess and Go boils down to predicting what your opponent is going to do next. You have a limited (if really large) set of moves you have to analyse and check. Ultimately, developing a good AI for Chess or Go involves developing a more efficient algorithm for picking out "good" moves.

D&D... well, first you run into the fact that D&D has no actual victory condition, so gauging competency becomes much more difficult. Then you run into the fact that RPGs in general hinge on several things that computers are terrible at.

1) Interpreting natural language. Seriously, this is a big area of research because computers are shit at it, due to being utterly incapable of resolving ambiguities on the fly.

2) Social interaction. Oh, sure, we can pull all kinds of magic tricks to make it look like a computer is talking with you... But that's all those are.

3) Improvisation. I mean, the whole reason we have a DM and not just Friend Computer is because the DM can make value judgements for those times when the rules fall short. You'd have to code each new on-the-fly ruling and houserule into the AI every time you ran into one.

4) Bringing the Cheetos. I mean, have you ever seen a Cheetos delivery robot?

I mean, you probably could write an AI that could play a Fighter in combat pretty well? Or one that played some other relatively straight-forward character? But I can't really see one that plays any kind of character outside of combat (OK, the computer can just be that one dude that shows up just for combat, and naps through everything else).

The real problem with coding the AI would be dealing with all of the edge cases monsters introduce. Compared to developing a strategy to defeat (or flee from) an arbitrary encounter, making an AI that wins every single Go game it plays would be like making one that wins or draws every game of tic-tac-toe that it plays.

I've read about some learning programs usedfor de-bugging and eventually they get good at it.Provided some of the hurdles you mention havesome sort of intro-work-around, said debuggingcould be used the other way around, to locatethe nifty C.O.-ish points.

Personally, I think the d&d rule-set(s) is (are)way bigger than the Bible and they've beenarguing about that one for a really long time.

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avatar#3 , gravitational lensing edition ... I'm way on the other side of the universe but look like pretty rings

It's just an evolution model, really. It's sort of like splicing videos together of other people doing well at something. Then when you line up the video so the motions don't look edited, you say "Look how well I continuously score!" Well, yeah.

Don't get me wrong. It is an achievement, and one that took a lot of work. But its not something inherently special. It's not real AI

Seriously. It's painful. You have to play in slow-motion to have any hope of fighting back. It's also kind of beautiful to see the laser efficiency. Now, coding the above without the maphack is actually challenging but no longer brutal in efficiency.

Aliens are gonna be so confused by my kitty avatar ... and hey shout-out to the aliens that did find this 10 billion years in the future.

We don't understand that kitty, and we're people. But nice acknowledgement of the time-depth before any kind of intelligent interstellar travel would make it here. That's far more realistic than zooming by casually for some butt-probing, cow slaughter, and grass patterns.

@Amechra with enough code, you could make a program that played DnD as a simple PC. What you couldn't do is make a program that DMd. That's the difference between making routines for a new DotA hero's AI and asking a programmer to make a program that programs sufficiently interesting new dota mechanics (heroes, items, terrain features, etc). The first is doable, if incredibly tedious. Yes, it won't be perfect, but it will usually perform decently well. 2) is up in the air and 3 is right out. You could only sub a computer bot for 1 player. You couldn't, say, run a whole party of them and expect anything beyond simple combat.

by-the-way, Lee Sedol the Go champ lost 3 straight before getting a resignation from AlphaGo.Amazing.

Aliens ... yeah I have no idea, let's say maybe 1 per Billion years, and we wouldn't see anything except for broken down tech. And similar for whatever comes after. But oh what fun you'll have in an undistinguishable-from-our-reality simulation with my kitty avatar's Tail playing the Dr.Suess + Cthulhu combo. Oh what fffphl-fun !!

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avatar#3 , gravitational lensing edition ... I'm way on the other side of the universe but look like pretty rings

I know one of the AI's solved Poker, but the program is way too complicated for a Human to try to play.

Monopoly could be their next real target.The #'s have been known for quite a while.

Programs couldn't handle the social side of bluffing, and wheeling/dealing with the other players, but one of the AI Psych-bots might figure some of this out.What's the magic word : heuristically? (idk)

The really fancy maths of the mortgages and the official rules that most people don't actually follow, are right up Wall Street's alley. They could probablyget this part long before the Psych-bots work.

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avatar#3 , gravitational lensing edition ... I'm way on the other side of the universe but look like pretty rings

Getting AI to optimize D&D would take a significant amount of rewriting the rules into something a computer can understand and process efficiently. I'm somewhat looking forward to that possibility because then it might be something rules creators can look at to make for less ambiguous rules that players don't get into petty squabbles over.

Of note is computers are already getting proficient at analyzing legal documents for various discrepancies and other such things.

According to IBM, the cloud-delivered enterprise-ready Watson has seen its speed increase 24 times over—a 2,300 percent improvement in performance, and its physical size shrank by 90 percent—from the size of a master bedroom to three stacked pizza boxes.

that was two years ago. next year is should half that...

with luck my grandkids will have a bot as the wage earner for the family.

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The goal of power is power. - 1984We are not descended from fearful men. - MurrowThe Final Countdown is now stuck in your head.

Heh don't be that optimistic.There are jobs that are not Robot-able.But lots of jobs will fall by the way side soon.

There isn't equal distibution of computing powerand people who have it and can use it productivelyare obviously better off.

I mean this is an off-the-cuff old school grumble, but most phone calls and texts, have no economic value.

I went in to get my final paycheck from Pizza Dorks.They were having their record busiest hour.I hopped on the phones for 1 hour. Manager couldn't figure how to pay me since I'd already quit.Decided to give me $35 free food.I knew that usually they did worker food at 1/2 off.It was still about 5 times minimum (at the time I though awesome!).I took about 70 calls, each one about $10 of food = $700 of business.My labor rate was barely above 2%.I much later found out, that high teens % was normal.5 * 5 = 25I worked at 1/25th the wage I deserved. Or worse.

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avatar#3 , gravitational lensing edition ... I'm way on the other side of the universe but look like pretty rings